Matt Bush is the Chief Revenue Officer at Smartly, an AI-powered advertising platform that specialises in automating creative and media buying. Joining Smartly after 13 years at Google, latterly as MD, Agency, Partners, Tech, Creative, he has been instrumental in transforming Smartly into an enterprise-grade platform for the world’s largest brands.
It’s been a while since we caught up, and it feels like the industry has shifted significantly in that time. How has Smartly evolved during your tenure?
In the two and a half years I have been here, the business has changed dramatically. We have transformed from a strong business into a great one by focusing on solving complex problems for the world’s biggest advertisers.
Our goal is to drive better connections and engagement while moving away from a fatigue-driven advertising environment. We want to create content that actually stops the scroll and makes people take notice.
Practitioners today are often overwhelmed by the number of platforms they have to manage. How does your technology simplify that workflow?
It is almost impossible for a human to be an expert in every single platform via their individual interfaces. By partnering with all the top platforms via APIs, we enable practitioners to log into a single platform to run their creative, their media, and their intelligence.
It makes the workflow much more productive. PWC audited our workflows and found a 13% ROAS improvement, which has since grown to 18%. More importantly, tasks that used to take a practitioner 60 minutes now take just 18 minutes with us because we are AI and automation-driven.
Everyone is talking about outcomes at the moment. How do you define a successful outcome for your clients?
It really depends on what the brand is looking to achieve, whether that is more sales, a reduction in CPA, or more cost-effective reach.
We launched a tool called Brand Pulse a couple of years ago to help marketers understand mid and upper-funnel metrics, which have traditionally been harder to prove than lower-funnel performance.
It provides real-time reach and frequency data, allowing marketers to see the cost per incremental daily reach. Because digital allows us to see things in real time, we can optimise on the fly rather than waiting for a campaign to finish.
You recently acquired a company called Incremental. Was that a response to specific challenges your clients were facing?
Absolutely. We listen to our clients constantly, and incrementality was the biggest challenge they highlighted. They had plenty of data from attribution paths and MMA models, but they didn’t truly understand what was driving incremental value.
We chose Incremental because their technology is robust and they were already working with large advertisers. We are now embedding them into our workflow so brands can see exactly which platforms, campaigns, and creatives are providing the holy grail of measurement.
Video is clearly the dominant format right now, but it feels more fragmented than ever. How are you helping brands navigate social versus streaming?
Most video growth is happening in social channels and streaming, but marketers find it difficult to bring those pieces together.
We have partnered with Amazon’s DSP, specifically their premium video products like Prime, to build an end-to-end video strategy. For the first time, you can think about your social video alongside your streaming video from a single interface.
This allows you to coordinate messaging as audiences move from one platform to the next, which is really exciting.
With so many platforms claiming to be a single source of truth, how do you convince a brand to pick Smartly?
We try to be as open as possible. Our intelligence suite is designed to ingest a marketer’s own data, whether that is retail data, first-party data, or live feeds.
We don’t want to be a closed shop. We work with agencies to augment their massive data sets with ours, pushing them into the Smartly platform to drive better results.
Ultimately, a brand has to settle on one source to measure impact, and we believe a single workflow for both creative and media is the closest they will get to that truth.
You mentioned that creative is often the missing piece of the data puzzle. How are you using data to improve the actual ads?
We aren’t about the hero creative idea, that is for the agencies and brand experts. We are about taking those assets from one to 100,000. We use templates to localise and personalise creative at scale.
Because our media and creative are connected, we can see exactly which element of an asset, the strap line, the image, or even the colour, is driving performance. Creative fatigue is a real thing, and the smartest advertisers are now using these deep insights to dynamically change their content to keep audiences engaged.
Is the Chief Financial Officer becoming a more important stakeholder in these conversations than they used to be?
Increasingly, yes. CFOs are under immense pressure to use AI to drive efficiency and performance, especially in public companies. They want to know two things: will this save me money, and will this make me money?
We can show them how to do both. While the CMO and CTO remain critical, the conversation has moved toward pure business outcome metrics rather than just industry-standard media metrics. We are helping brands become more profitable by improving internal workflows.
You have a history of working closely with agencies. Has that relationship changed as you have moved toward an enterprise model?
Agencies are essential and are arguably the best example of an ever-reinventing industry. When I joined, we were very brand-direct, but I have focused on building out our agency team and strategy.
Agencies have the strategy and planning expertise that we don’t provide. We look for the white space where our best-in-class technology can plug into their overarching workflow. Usually, we start with a few brands, prove the performance, and then evolve into a tier-one partnership.
Smartly seems to be attracting a different level of talent lately. What has changed in your employer brand?
We are hiring people from major tech players who probably wouldn’t have looked at Smartly five years ago. We have turned into a proper enterprise solution that talks to Fortune 500 companies with massive, complex needs.
We are expanding rapidly, opening a new office in Mexico City to run our LATAM business. To handle those massive challenges around regionalisation and localisation, you need people who understand how to build and scale products at that level. It is a phenomenal time for the business.
